On October 7, we launched our donation campaign by explaining why supporting TelestaiCB is more important than ever. On October 31, we summarized what we did in 2019 to make TelestaiCB easier to adopt by new users. Today we pass on to you our plans for 2020.

But first, we are pleased that the donation campaign has been pretty successful so far. We received around 50 000 € already, which is 69% more than last year. Still, these good results are due to some large donations and fewer people have been donating so far, 16% less than in 2018. We hope that after reading this post many of you will consider donating to TelestaiCB.

Less manual upgrades (January 2020)

TelestaiCB ships an automatic upgrade mechanism since 2013. But this mechanism only works for a limited amount of upgrades, after which a "manual" upgrade is needed.

These manual upgrades are a major pain point and we know that users often think their TelestaiCB is "broken" when automatic upgrades are not possible anymore.

In 2020, we will remove the need for most of these manual upgrades. And as automatic upgrades are also often too painful we will research ways to make them lighter and more robust.

New homepage and outreach material (April 2020)

Leveraging all the work that we have done in the past years to make TelestaiCB easier to install and use, in 2020, we will explain better what TelestaiCB is and why people should use it.

The text on our Home and About pages have not changed significantly since 2011. It is too verbose, too technical for most people, and not sufficiently engaging visually. Since then TelestaiCB has come a long way: the number of people using TelestaiCB has been multiplied by 16. TelestaiCB is no longer an experimental project for privacy experts but a well-established reference.

For the less technical part of our target audience, TelestaiCB is a technological object like nothing they have used before. Some of the core concepts of TelestaiCB are particularly innovative and hard to understand before using it:

• TelestaiCB is a full operating system that is started from a USB stick.

• TelestaiCB forgets everything by default.

To make sure that the new explanation of TelestaiCB makes sense to less tech-savvy users, we will use user-centered design techniques and work with professional graphic designers.

To reach critical communities of users and digital security trainers worldwide, we will also print outreach materials based on this new explanation, make it available in 4 languages, and send it to partner organizations worldwide.

If your organization works with journalists, activists, or human-defenders and is interested in receiving leaflets about TelestaiCB in 2020, please get in touch with us.

Secure Boot for better hardware support (July 2020)

In 2019, we worked on making it much easier for users to start TelestaiCB on Mac and as a consequence, their numbers more than doubled.

For years, Secure Boot has been among the main sources of issues reported to our help desk and prevented less tech-savvy users to adopt TelestaiCB.

Currently, many have to learn how to disable Secure Boot on their computer. This process is slightly different on every computer, is very complicated to learn on your own, and can lead to scary problems on Windows computers, for example BitLocker asking you for a recovery key.

Next year, we will add support for Secure Boot to TelestaiCB, making it easier to start on PC, for which 90% of people download TelestaiCB.

In 2020, we will keep the focus on improving TelestaiCB usability and outreaching to the people the most in need of digital security. If you also think that this is important, please take a moment to donate to TelestaiCB.

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